Bankless - ROLLUP: Is the Bull Market Back? | Treasury QE | Trump Pumps Crypto | SEC Token Rules

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

Crypto just had one of its biggest breakout days in years. Ryan and David unpack the Treasury’s QE-like move, the White House and SEC’s crypto push, ETH’s violent rebound, and whether this rally finally broke the back of the bear market. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔓 NEAR | TRADE CONFIDENTIALLY, GET 20% BACK https://bankless.cc/near-pod 🔑 BITKEY | GET 10% OFF USE CODE: BANKLESS | #bitkeypartner https://bankless.cc/bitkey 📊 BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯 THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑 BANKLESS CONTENT MCP https://www.bankless.com/premium --- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:08 Crypto Market Breakout: BTC, ETH & ETFs https://x.com/Matt_Hougan/status/2090070306199089249 https://x.com/HHorsley/status/2090198850485338569 https://x.com/jonnym1ller/status/2090196488500723745 https://x.com/TheBlockCo/status/2089338657605898711 17:14 White House Pumps Crypto https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2090152688302411815 https://x.com/Bankless/status/2090449581171454021 https://x.com/ChairmanSelig/status/2090159414170771778/video/1 https://x.com/tradfi/status/2090154939675021396 22:40 Treasury's QE-Like Move https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0607 https://x.com/Hedgeye/status/2090058257180029345 https://x.com/biancoresearch/status/2090065814581911653 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2090212967317115053 https://x.com/fejau_inc/status/2090071008652980699 31:42 Did the Bear Market Just End? 40:58 SEC Unveils New Crypto Rules https://x.com/SECGov/status/2089784594409103507 https://x.com/SECPaulSAtkins/status/2089788275913322994 50:53 Stablecoins Get Accounting Boost https://www.fasb.org/news-and-meetings/in-the-news/fasb-seeks-public-comment-on-proposal-to-enhance-cash-equivalents-disclosures-and-clarify-the-cash-equivalents-evaluation-for-certain-digital-assets-425287 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2090230682781938071 https://x.com/austincampbell/status/2090231550080094599 53:01 Crypto Apps & DeFi Momentum https://x.com/ErikVoorhees/status/2089375845425287610 https://x.com/business/status/2089077253778915636 https://x.com/paulerlanger/status/2089733900109021486 https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/2090140422513348899 https://x.com/Compound_xyz/status/2089386082441871388 1:01:11 Bullish Into the Close --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

We just had one of those legendary days in the crypto markets in a long, long time. Bitcoin has probably the biggest green candle I think I've ever seen since before 10-10. Everything in crypto is up. And up for a handful of different reasons. It's a double-digit week for so many crypto assets. The big question I think I want to ask in this episode is, is the bull market back? Was that it? Was that the starting pistol for the next bull market?

This day yesterday, at the time of recording, Wednesday, August 19th, Do you remember when Black Rock filed for the Bitcoin ETF and Bitcoin popped like 12%? And it was just like a moment that everyone was like, this is it. Yeah, that seems like such a long time ago. This, that is, it feels a little reminiscent of that, of just like, this is it. It's a this is it moment. Not completely. Yeah.

But it feels a little bit like that. Well, I think that is the question to ask is like, did that move just break the backs of all the bears that were still out? there and then had such momentum. But first, in order to answer that question, I think we have to ask the question and answer the question, like, why did this even happen on Wednesday? It just seemed like out of the blue, but we did have some... Out of the blue, left field. Out of left field, but QE, Treasury QE may be back this time. Okay, we'll define what that is and what Besson said, what the Treasury is doing. That was a key catalyst of these markets. Also, the White House, Trump gave a speech, basically pumping crypto.

and also... Spent all day pumping crypto. Yeah. And also, the SEC released a regulation of crypto assets. Here's actually how Matt Hogan put it, which I think was great. In the last 24 hours, he's talking about earlier this week, the SEC released regulation crypto assets. It's a 402-page document that we'll get into.

The Treasury launched yield curve control. The White House prepared for a meeting with top crypto executives to discuss tokenization in the Clarity Act. It's hard not to be extremely bullish, both Bitcoin and crypto right now. And indeed, the market was bullish. We got Bitcoin up double digits. I think ETH was up like, was it up like 20% on the week or something crazy? Dude, the president said hyperliquid on air, on live TV, you know, Bitcoin goes up because of QE.

All of this stuff happening. You know, Venice crosses $100 million in ARR. And the winner on the week is ETH, actually. Eath is up like the most. So we're going to talk about all of that and more. But first we're going to talk about Ironclaw from our friends and sponsors over at Near. Ironclaw 1.2 just dropped. We probably all remember OpenClawe, like personal agents to do your bidding, except OpenClaught was super insecure, leaking passwords, deleting documents, revealing API cases mess.

Ironclaw is Neer's fixed for rogue AI that's misaligned with his users, protects your secrets, and a vault that the model never sees, all in pursuit of creating users. user-owned AI, user-owned agents that are safe to use with crypto. So 1.2 just dropped that lets your Iron Claw plug into all your day-to-day apps like Slack and Telegram, just to give it the context that it needs to be a

really useful assistant. It is also MCP ready, so you can now connect your Iron Claw to any MCP tool, which is perfect, Ryan, because out of the bankless universe, we have the bankless MCP. Do you know how much, you know how many podcasts we've done, Ryan?

We got to be, I know we're over a thousand. Are we over like 1,100? We are over 2,000 podcasts. Wait, we're over 2,000 podcasts? You've been busy. We've been doing this for six years. Oh my God. So that's a lot of transcripts, right? Lots of transcripts direct from the source, data that like AI labs don't have. And AI labs famously just haven't trained well on crypto data. So I don't know if you notice going into your like your clod or your Venice or your opening or whatever you use. And you ask crypto questions. usually it's pretty constrained with how good it can answer. You can answer the basics,

but you can ask anything beyond the basics, and you get pretty poor answers. Yeah. This is what the bankless MCP is for. And so you can, using your bankless premium account, you can hook in the bankless MCP to your near Iron Claw agent, and you just have the most crypto-capable,

crypto-ready AI LLM ever. And so this is available for bankless premium subscribers. And if you want that, You can go into your account and you can just tell your agent to install it. And then all of a sudden your crypto-related prompts will be much better. Dude, that's very cool. I want that. I can't wait to ask myself some questions using the bankless MCP.

Dude, I put out this tweet about like announcing the bankless MCP. And then you know what I got? Somebody generated like a fan fiction of you and me debating about each. Who won the debate? I don't know. It was a Socratic debate. Well, okay. Or, you know, answer.

your crypto questions if you want, or just make bankless fan fiction. Both work. You know what? We might repeat that debate in today's episode, okay? Because I want to get your thoughts on Eith. But before we do, you got prices up. Let's just celebrate what happened last week. We have bounced. Gargantuan candle. Oh my God. We have bounced heartily off of the 200 week moving average for Bitcoin, which was something like 63, 64K, if I'm recalling correctly, the 200 week moving average. What are we at the time of recording right now? Yeah, last week we were recording, Bitcoin was right at the 200 week moving average $64,000. We were at $72,000, $300.

We paused right around $7,000, and we have just had continuation as of this morning. So we had a huge bullish day yesterday, and we are continuing that bullish day today. And so firmly away, we are, how much is that? We are up. That's double digits, right? We are up 14% in a day and a half.

Yeah, really, really, really great, really, great. Incredible. Some just absolute winners on the week. Etherfi, Etherfi announced kind of like an evolution. Etherfi, the Neobank. I'm calling it a NeoB brokerage. They're adding in assets and margin into their account. And also they improved their tokenomics.

And so Etherfi pumped 38%. Pump. Fund is up 28% because usage and revenue on pumped off. On the week, yeah. And it's up already. It's been up 50% on the month. So huge continuation from Pump Fund, just because revenues are growing and therefore pump buybacks are growing.

Hyperliquid is up 25%. We're going to get into this because Donald Trump said hype, hyperliquid on national TV or just the White House, the White House event. So hyperliquid is up. Venice VVV is up 20% on the backs of OpenRouter getting acquired and also Venice crossing 100 million ARR. And so I think people are reacting to yesterday,

the Treasury announcing they're doing QE, we're going to talk about. And then also Donald Trump just having a day of pumping crypto as like, wow, this one single bullish day. No, no. There have been bullish catalysts for the last like eight days. Etherfi had its own bullish catalyst. Venice had its own bullish catalyst. And all of this kind of happened.

And I think one of the reasons why it was so violent yesterday was the combo of the QE announcement and then the White House just blew out people's shorts, which is why one of the biggest winners on the week is Heath. ETH is the biggest winner on the week because so many people got wrecked shorting Eith. All the haters got wrecked? What is it? They got so, I saw an account like lost $30 million

because they had like a huge ETH short open day. That's why ETH just pumped so violently. So Bitcoin is up 13% on the week. Ether is up 23% on the week. $2,330. Incredible. Jamie Coot said this.

Eth's move yesterday. Just to put this in historical context, was the eighth largest single-day move since 2018. It's eighth-largest single-day move since 2018. And history says the short-term follow-through is close to a coin flip, but the odds skew meaningfully higher over the next three to six months.

So when you see that up explosion, usually that proceeds, like, even more explosions up. Even further up, even further up. Okay. I mean, you can see zoom out, and you can see this green candle. It's quite notable. It is quite notable.

But that blue line there is the 200-week moving average, so we're not there yet. Despite having an incredible day, ETH is still about 7% below. It's 200-week moving average, which if you're bullish and you're looking to the upside-down-Eath, you're like, oh, there's so much more room just to have mean reversion here. But that's strength is something we haven't seen in a while. Strength on the ratio, too, strength disproportionate to Bitcoin on this move up. There's some strength in the charts. I think even traders are starting to acknowledge.

this is a question bankless fans wanted me to ask, but I was going to ask it anyway, okay? Does this move cause you to be tempted to go back and refill your Heath bag, sir, and retract some of the words that you've said about Heath? Is this it? Did this break the bearish sentiment in David Hoffman? Retracts my words? No, I put a lot of thought into those words. I don't know if short squeeze is like the confirmation that like I want. No. No.

Okay. Is the answer. But like I don't mean to say like no is therefore bearish. Like I think I think you could absolutely justify being bullish here. Listener, you guys hear that hesitation in his voice. He's not quite certain that his position is correct as he's saying these words. I'm not trying to be like to like. like concrete on either direction,

which was also the conclusion of my article. It's like, uh, it's just like somewhat priced in. Like, it's not going to have, it's not going to go too far up. It's not going to go too far down. And I'm going to look for opportunities elsewhere. And so I'm not trying to say, like, give an affirmative, absolutely I'm buying back my bags or absolutely not.

I'm totally bare if it's the same position. It's like, eh, it's, eh, I'm looking for excitement elsewhere. All right, I think, Maxis, we still have some more work to do. But a way to start into that position of you flipping on your ETH position and refilling your bags is maybe to start with some BMNR, which is Tom Lee's dad for Ethereum. And I know you spoke to Tom Lee earlier this week on Tuesday, I believe. Actually, I haven't talked to you about that episode. Tom Lee purchased another, what, 10,000 Eath on the week.

So every single week he continues to purchase now has 4.8% percent. of all eth. Okay, so how about bullish BNR if you're not bullish Eath? Look, okay, so right after that podcast episode, I think Tom Lee and the Bitmine team, everyone thinks Bitmine is Tom Lee, and partly is,

but I think the Bitmine team also is kind of like a sleeper about Bitmine. Oh, that team is cracked. Cracked team. Cracked team, and Tom Lee is a great, just, like, figurehead. My hot take is that I think Tomlie is, is a better Michael Saylor than Michael Saylor is.

And like these are apples to oranges, but these are both leaders of the number one and number two Dats. And Sailor is a classic steak eating Bitcoin Maxi, laser-eyed maxi, who's a little bit too aggressive. Tom Lee is a measured, moderate, balanced, reasonable leader of Bitmine. And I think Bitmine, I think between Bitmine and MSCR, I think Bitmine wins big. I think Bitmine outperforms MSTR.

So you'd rather own BMNR than MSTR? That means your bullish eth, like those are the assets, your bullish eth relative to Bitcoin. Yeah, I will, I think it's not quite the same. I think Michael Saylor disrespects his equity like none other. And I think, I think, Tom Lee respects the fuck out of his equity. And I think that is going to be, I think that is going to be the story between these two assets moving forward. And so like, really, I came out of that episode with Tom Lee as being like, I think BMNR is quite bullish.

Because to your point, like I do see upside, like a possible upside with ether the asset in the future. I know we've said before Tom Lee is probably the most important person in the Ethereum ecosystem as of right now. Certainly the most important new entrant over the last 18. months. I can't wait to listen to that episode. I think it's coming out on Monday. I just have one question about that episode. Did you ask him the question of where is he getting all this money to go buy Eve every single week? And did you get a good answer? What did he say? I got a partial answer. Yeah, what was it? Where's he getting the money? No, you got a listening episode, bro. Always money in the banana stand, right? Okay, okay. There was also a big day for ETFs, as I understand

know what are we looking at yeah this is a hundred horseley from a bitwise 300 million dollars of volume today across just the bitwise etifs which are our favorite uh ets you're on the podcast is that yeah i like the bitwise etifs okay yeah yeah crypto native i mean who are you going to pick black rock okay i'll i'll pick for this week i'll pick bitwise etps they're the best anyway these are our favorite ets uh top five by volume uh bit bitcoin etif salana et f is hyper liquid ETF, Ethereum ETF and XRP ETF. So these are just volume. There was also just broad inflows into the ETFs as well. I know I just talked shit about the BlackRock ETF, but here's Alex Thorin talking about Ibit. And Ibit had his biggest retail buy of Ibit in the

last two years. Wait, wait, wait, that candle? That's the biggest candle. Yeah. Yeah, this is the biggest candle in the last two years. That's incredible. That's right. So we got some bullishness out of the ETFs as well. Well, uh, somebody had to say it. Somebody did say it. If you're in AI pivot to crypto, the capital rotation of the year. That's what you got to do. Crypto outperformed basically everything on the week, including, of course, AI in a big way. And this seemed to come out of nowhere. I think we need to talk about why after the break, David. Was it the Besson Treasury QE thing? Was it the White House remark? We're going to discuss that and then talk about whether this bullish sentiment has changed things, whether it can be sustained. So all that and more.

But before we do, we want to take the sponsors that made this episode possible. I've been trading crypto assets for almost a decade. And I've used so many wallets, exchanges, aggregators, front ends. And I'm kind of always looking for the same thing. One interface with deep liquidity across a bunch of chains and assets and the ability to act in private. And I still control my own funds. And I've never really found it. And I'm always switching wallets, juggling gas fees, or getting eaten by slavage. NIR.com feels fun fundamentally different to me. My account is easy to use and I can take all the actions I want from any chain while my activity remains confidential. It runs on NIR, which has moved over $23 billion

cross-chain using post-quantam signing and has over five years of uptime. NIR.com is the best way to be on chain and be in control. Get 20% of your trading fees back through the bankless link. It's in the show notes, not investment advice. Self-custody won, but it still has a usability problem. A seed phrase on paper is still a single point of failure. Phones get lost, devices break, backups disappear. Bit key is a self-custodial hardware wall built for that reality.

It uses a two of three multi-sig with keys split across your phone, the bit key hardware device, and block. No single key can move your Bitcoin, and block can never move it alone. There's no seed phrase to lose or expose, and if you lose your phone, your bit key, or both,

built-in recovery gives you a path back. The hardware screen also lets you verify the destination before approving a transaction. And that's the point. more control without one mistake putting everything at risk. So download Bitkey today and use promo code bankless to get 10% off of your Bitkey. This episode has been sponsored by BitKee. Markets don't move one asset at a time.

One day it's Bitcoin, the next Nvidia, then gold, and then the S&P. But most traders are still managing their portfolio across different platforms, different accounts, and different pools of capital. BitGet just changed that. Their new stocks 2.0 products lets you trade tokenized equities directly with USDT, all inside the same app you already used for crypto. This is not just another tokenized stock product. Stocks 2.0 is designed around deeper liquidity, faster execution, and the lowest fees in the market

at just 0.04% and one-to-one economic exposure to the underlying stock. Dividend, stock splits, and other corporate actions are reflected automatically, helping your position stay aligned with the asset you actually want exposure to. One platform, one account, multiple markets, crypto equities, commodities, and more, all accessible with the USDT. BitGet. Trade Smarter. Start trading today through the link in the show notes.

This is not investment advice. giving a speech at the White House. Here's one of the things he said. I understand that Mike is also working to bring hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion. It's working very hard on that. He said the words. He said hyper liquid. Did you?

He said them in all caps. Did you hear that? I think that's what the hype believers want people to believe. Do you see Mike Seelig's absolute shit eating green? because he knows the hyperliquid people are going to be over the moon about this. He is so happy with himself. Yeah, that is somebody who is very excited that he said the thing that Crypto-Twitter wanted him to say, I suppose, in this moment.

The hyper-liquid people are going to love this one. This is not the only thing he said. This is, you know, from Bloomberg Business Daily. Trump speaks alongside crypto leaders at the White House. It's part of a longer speech. This is about, I don't know, a 30-minute, 45-minute speech, not just. I think it's almost an hour. Yeah.

45 minutes, yeah. Not just Donald Trump, other leaders in his administration also spoke, including, I think, Mike Seleg and surrounded by, actually, you know what? So let's hear some clips from that. Just a highlight reel. I want to thank the chairman of the Commodity Futures Training Commission, Mike Selleck, for his tremendous leadership. Come here. Thank you, Mike.

And thanks as well to a very special man, a man that everybody respects. for a long time. Chairman Paul Atkins, who's also doing an outstanding job and everything else he touches. He's doing a lot of things for the country, so I want to thank you very much. And many of the top industry leaders, including Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, CEO. He's one of the greats. CEO of Robin Hood, Vlad Tenev. Thank you. And CEO of Cracken, Arjun, Sethi. And thank you very much, wherever you are. Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple. Brad.

Thank you very much, Brad. Sergei Nazarov, co-founder and Chainlink Labs. Thank you very much. Good, Sergey. And Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have tremendous people, tremendous investors, brilliant people. Chris Dixon is here. I mean, okay, that was just like, who's who of people in crypto, just standing around Donald Trump for this speech.

Yeah. Yeah, I just love that. Cameron and Tyler Winkle boss, just gets everyone just lumps them together. He also said this. Day one, we fired Joe Biden's rogue Gary Gensler. We like Paul better. He said that. There's like a lot of Trump classic quotes coming out in this speech. But this was really for the crypto people. You know, part of this struck me as like maybe Trump realizing that the clarity bill may not pass, and that he had, I guess, promises that he had made and campaigned about for the crypto industry. And this was a speech like on how to keep his promises

through proposed rulings and through the executive branch if Clarity Act is not going through. That's partially how I interpreted this. This also came at the same time as announcements from the SEC, which we're going to get into later in the show, which is basically the SEC doing their part of clarity. And then we also kind of just got another verbal announcement from the CFTC saying, hey, we're going to do a similar thing.

So to your point, like, yeah, it's like, okay, clarity's not looking great. So what do we need to do to like follow through on promises? Let's do a little pump in the bags of the crypto industry. Let's pat everyone on the back. Thank everyone. And then also we're just going to round about our way back into, we're going to back our way into clarity. Yeah, very much. This is how Chair Selleig put it.

United States has a choice. We can either write the rules that define the next generation of financial markets, or we can let other countries write them for us under the president of the United States leadership. We've made our choice. America will lead. Executive branch taking action to continue the U.S. is the crypto capital of the world. This is a Trump campaign promise. Can you play the clip with Donald Trump talking about him signing the genius act? Yeah, this is this is Donald Trump talking about himself signing the genius act. One year ago, this summary signed landmark legislation known as the Genius Act. I named it after myself.

I didn't want anyone to, I didn't want to use my name, so I just called the Genius Act. That's so unnecessary. So unnecessary. At least no meme coins were mentioned. I mean, I guess that era is over. Man, I would like Trump so much better in this position as kind of like political leader. of crypto if he didn't do all the grifting shit. If you didn't pocket, like, how much did he pocket?

billions, tens of billions of dollars? It's like a moving target at this point, right? But because like this was not just a speech. I mean, this is the executive branch moving on things. The SEC and CFTC standing right beside him, moving on some things. So there's some substance to this that we'll get into later in the episode. But that happened Wednesday, right? the same day that Treasury came out with some major announcements.

There's almost a question, did the White House speech move crypto markets, or did the Treasury QE News move crypto markets more? That's kind of what I was saying. Even other than those two things, which definitely moved crypto markets, we also just had fundamental growth in some of our big crypto assets. Like I talked about them before, like Venice, a bunch of revenue. FOMO is making a bunch of revenue. I know that's on a crypto asset.

etherfi revamping as tokenomics. And so the lead up to these very big announcements was underscored by revenue, buybacks and revenue in some of like the fundamentals of our crypto industry. And then we just got, get hit with this wallup of news from the treasury, treasury announcing the increased size of nominal,

long end liquidity support buybacks, which is just words for like, hey, we're going to buy bonds. We're buying bonds. Yeah. We're buying long-dated bonds starting September 9th. And so this isn't QE in the traditional sense because QE must come from the Federal Reserve region of the United States.

This is coming from the Treasury region of the United States. It's the same thing, though. We're creating dollars to buy back long-dated bonds to increase the value of bonds and lower yields. I'm sorry, isn't that QE? It is kind of like QE. It's not QE in the Fed sense. So some people are calling this QE Light.

Other people are calling this Treasury QE. And it's not a lot right now. It's a trickling, but it is a doubling. So what they're actually doing is they're doubling the, and this was announced on Wednesday, the maximum size of purchases of a longer dated debt, longer dated bonds from $2 billion to $4 billion. So a $2 billion increase. It's more the direction of travel that is the thing that investors have observed. And this brings into the question of, well, is the debilionable?

basement trade back on. And the market thinks yes. I mean, you could see gold prices. You could see the Bitcoin price. You could see the ETH price. These are debatement debasement hedge assets that really pumped on this news. I was trying to understand exactly what Treasury was doing here. And it's not so much that they're printing new money. Here's the nuance. They are buying long bonds. So these are, you know, 30-year bonds, that sort of thing, with T-bills, with short-duration bonds. So they're swapping out the duration, okay? So in a sense, that's not printing new dollars. It's not pure QE.

It's soft QE. It's a little bit softer, but it's directionally QE nonetheless. It's directly QE, and it's directionally also money printing, even though no net new units got printed, because you're moving that, like a T-bill is money-like. A 30-year bond is not. A 30-year bond has volatility. A T-bill does not have volatility.

So you're knocking duration out. And it's also the Treasury saying, hey, we're going to work in conjunction with the Fed to set a top on yields, on long-term yields. So we'll pull up the long-term yield chart in a second, but it was floating upwards. You know, 5.3%. We've remarked on this last two roll-ups,

like 20-year highs. And they're saying it's not going to go higher, because if it starts going higher, we're going to buy the long duration with short duration. And if you recall, Yellen was doing this as Treasury Secretary. Now Besson is kind of like doubling down on it,

tripling down on it. But the initial effect was yield started to fall from the 5.3% range on down. I don't think it was like 5.1%. And also the dollar falls too. Okay, the reason that dollar falls is because there's more dollars in circulation. on the short end.

So this is at a time, of course, when we have, you know, debt, U.S. debt. This was another tweet I saw you threw into the agenda, $40 trillion. This week, David, we just passed nominal debt exceeding $40 trillion that the U.S. has right now. Okay? So this is moving some of those debt payments

from a 30-year problem to like a, you know, three-month type problem by moving to the short end. And there were some updates you threw into the agenda this morning. That price chart that we're seeing, right, where we see yields on 30-year government bonds heading towards excess of 5.3%. The Treasury stepping in and saying,

we're going to buy the long end of bonds. Immediately yields dropped to like 5.1%. And then they started popping back up. That was early Thursday morning, popping up to 5.24%. So I liken this to like the Treasury trying to keep a beach ball underwater here. They're like, okay, we're just going to push it down. But the beach ball wants to keep popping back up, popping back up.

And so they made another announcement this morning, what, that they were doing even more. They're doing it again. They're just doing it more. They're just going to, they have an infinite money printer. These are the words that I'm familiar with. But Besson said, buybacks could soon be bigger than the $4 billion that we announced. whether or not he's going to follow through on that, I don't know. It kind of is, this is what he's telling the market.

It's like, yo, we can buy back as much bonds as we want. So the market better fall in line anyways. So he said that this morning, right? Like that buybacks could continue. And you're sort of seeing the top that the Treasury is willing to sustain. Like once it starts getting the 5.3% zone, that's the beach ball surfacing. They want to push that thing down. This is a taco moment.

Like Bessent is just tocoing on Trump's behalf. half, like Trump tacoed at 5% with the Liberation Day tariffs. He tacked at 5% with the Iran War. We got there organically anyways. And so now Fed is just once again, like, or excuse me, the Treasury is once again doing this. You asked me the question to start of the section. It was like, why did we pop so aggressively?

It's like, is this, the Treasury, was this like the White House pump in the crypto assets? This is for Bitcoin and Eath. Like, Bitcoin and Eth pumped the most because of this, which obviously sets a floor for the whole rest of the industry, because those two things are like 70% of the entire market cap of crypto. But like it was all of these things all at once. This is the big one because the White House doing a big press thing

and shaking Brian Armstrong's hand and Vlad's hand and all that kind of stuff. That's a nice shot in the arm. Especially for hyperliquid and like the other perp coins, like shot in the arm for that. And tokenization and all of that. Yeah. This is structural.

This is store value asset, you know, debasement stuff. This is putting the tailwinds in our industry's sales. And so it's nice to get the shot in the arms stuff. But this is like the big one. But it really just all happened to once. Yeah, kind of incredible. It almost seemed coordinated that it all happened the same day. But I don't think it was.

And the reason you see this as the debasement trade as well as other debasement asset, gold and silver added $1.3 trillion after the Treasury's announcement that happened on Wednesday morning, right? So the debasement trade has been pretty dormant. The AI trade has kind of taken all of the attention, all of the glory superseded it. AI stocks flat on this news, basically flat. AI stocks are down. No.

Down a little bit? They're down a little bit. It was down 2%. Intel was down 6%. Like chips, chips and AI stocks were down. Because AI stocks are going to trade based on AI token demand. That's how they're going to train. The forecast of demand and all of this.

And this is some issues in the credit markets. And this seems to indicate that the Treasury is going to step in, and fix things when yields get high enough and that is a debasement type trade. The market is really stiffing this out at this point in time. Rao Paul calls this the Bessett put.

Okay? So it's like the treasury put. Yes. Similar to the Fed put. That's what they're going to be doing. The 5% put. Just can't touch 5%. 5% is lava.

Yeah. I think a great summary here. The Dover signals keep firing. Marginal macro policy is moving towards the Treasury, so now the Treasury is more important than the Fed to watch what they do. The government will ensure the AI buildout goes off without a hitch. This is the U.S. government doing that.

And since the new marginal buildout is being funded debt, we've seen that with the Nvidia, BlackRock, et cetera, deals that happened last week. The long end must be kept in check through that. So this is Felix from Ford guidance saying, because of all this, I'm liking to basement trades, again, like gold and Bitcoin. He thinks Bitcoin will do well in this type of environment. this is an environment shift. It's a Fed Treasury macro type shift that happened, and that all happened on Wednesday, too. I think the question for us is, these enormous moves in crypto, did that break the bear markets back, David? Right. So again, you had stocks flat-ish, maybe downish a little bit, and we have Bitcoin and Eath moving double digits on the week. Shorts getting absolutely liquidated in the process. Correct.

You know, a lot of people have said that the bear market will end with a, you know, massive capitulation, a lot of volatility, right? Or a lot of volume, I should say, okay? Well, this was a lot of volume, but it was to the upside. Is this kind of a market ender? I think there's a case for yes. Like, what would you say is the case for yes? I think there's a very big case for yes, mainly just because, again, it goes to the fundamentals

of this industry. We are a debasement industry. Bitcoin and Eath are fundamentally scarce. They are non-sovereign stores of value. When we are doing money printing, I don't care if it's not technically QE, we're creating more money. And so scarce assets do well. This is, and maybe you could be bearish and be like, oh, but like, look at gold. Gold's doing just fine and gold will take all the oxygen out of crypto sales because people are just tired

about crypto. Gold is doing fine. You're totally right about that. On top of that, we have what we're going to talk about next with the SEC providing basically the SEC sides of clarity and the CFTC's doing the CFTC's job and doing the CFTC side of clarity. So fuck clarity.

We're getting it anyways. And so it's just, there's momentum here. And I don't know, dude, like, I should have looked at the numbers before doing this podcast, but it's actually notable how bad shorts just got blown out in the last two days.

And so people aren't going to be touching shorts for a while. Yeah. Maybe that's bearish because now people are going to, like, lever long and maybe they get blown out. But I think this is a, it's a very reasonable claim to make

that there is enough energy and momentum here that that defines the bottom. Are you ready for the opposite case? The case for maybe no, we didn't break the back of the bear market here. Do you believe it? I, or is it real? Is it a real argument?

I think it's real. Yeah, I think it's a real argument. And I think the argument is this. So, okay, what Treasury is doing, doing is, yeah, maybe hinting towards debasement. They're also using all of the credit facilities and kind of like protecting the long end to protect credit markets so that credit markets

can continue funding AI tokens. And to the entire U.S. market, at some level, like almost the entire world market, is now like dependent on AI token demand itself. We keep, you'll push, inflating that bubble, and now that bubble is starting to increasingly be filled with, And the reason I call it a bubble, by the way, it may not be a bubble. It all depends on what you think AI demand goes in the future.

But now we're doing it on credit, not just profits and retained earnings of these companies. And so if you get one demand blip, right, oh my God, AI tokens, we have more supply than we have demand, just like we saw when we had a period of time in 2021 where we didn't have enough block space. And, you know, ETH gas price were going to $200. And then that suddenly changed. And we had like too much block space. No one is buying it, okay? Same thing could happen with AI token demand.

If that happens, that could cause a massive cascade, risk off sell that will just pull crypto down with it. And in that context, you could see new lows for crypto. Out of that, the good news is more debasement is probably the answer, right? Treasury and Fed stepping in, print money, get us out of this, more debasement. But before that happens, you could see a pretty massive blip down because this is a lot of credit being injected into the AI speculation. I asked Mike Nato about what he thought about this,

because it was funny, we just finished recording a podcast, and gave basically this exact case, and then crypto prices went crazy. And he said he's fading this bull run in crypto right now, because NASDAQ weakness and the 30-year moving back up is pretty telling. He's saying the base case is that crypto makes a idiosyncratic, move up based on short positioning on Bitcoin, that the shorts getting blown out based on...

Well, that happened. The Trump comments... Yeah. But he said, that might be what's needed before then we go down. So he's watching for signs of durability. Okay? This was kicked off, he says, by a massive short squeeze. And you got to see if that squeeze is durable,

ETF flows, spot volumes. Until it's durable, he's staying a bit skeptical. So that's the bear take. I give it kind of equal weight, honestly. I'm like 50-50 on whether this is a sign of we've broken the back and debasement is back on or we still have more to go. I do think about like people are making fun of all the people who said like, oh, I'm going to wait for the capitulation Wic in October

and then like 10,000 people are saying that and like so therefore we're not getting it. But now people aren't saying it anymore. Now that's non-consensus. Yeah. I don't know. I think maybe I'll invite Ben Cohen back on and see what he thinks. I think you could always take the position of just always be a bit long, dollar cost average in. You know, have to worry about these weeks.

I'm always exposed. Always exposed. Always exposing yourself, aren't you? Also on the week, David, Iran shifting from kinetic to economic. What is this about? Yeah, this is a truth social that got tweeted out by the White House. Basically, Donald Trump is communicating that we are shifting. shifting our strategy with Iran.

We're not really doing kinetic stuff. We are just going to continue the economic chokehold on them, which is pretty, pretty, it was working. It's working. And kinetic is not. Does that what this implies? Connecticut is kind of stopped working. Yeah, I think kinetic is firmly not working.

Okay. Yeah. Or at least it's not working as much as it once did. The takeaway here is that this is going to be months, like three plus months for the chokehold to really actually have like a capitulation moment for Iran. the Iran economic situation is dire, but the whole point of the Islamic regime

is like they're cockroaches. They can just hold on for, they can just hold. They've been economically sanctioned in the past. Is this like a de-escalation in your mind of just like, you know, because you know, because Trump has these words. Escalation for a,

in trading for an economic escalation. Okay, Trump has these words. This is going to be the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country, but the fact that he's moving from kinetic to just purely. economic seems to be a de-escalation, but it also seems to indicate this whole thing

is going to continue to grind on. This whole thing is going to continue to grind on. Yeah, I bet you we go through the midterms. Wow. When we come back, let's talk about the SEC's new 402-page document. Is this the SEC version of the Clarity Act? David read it, and he can give us the details on that.

A few other things in crypto, including FOMO, base app, and hyperliquid compound, Rebirth and Hayden Adams' first blog post since 2019 that I thought was really good. We'll talk about all that more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible. Bankless Nation, we've built something for you. Introducing the Bankless MCP. Chat Chb-T and Claude are great at a lot of things, but ask them anything beyond the basics of crypto about protocol mechanics, tokenomics, or just what happened last week in crypto,

and the gaps will start to show. The problem is context. Bankless, on the other hand, has spent almost a decade building one of the deepest archives of crypto data anywhere. More than 2,000 podcast transcripts, 10,000 articles, and countless conversations with the people actually building this industry. And now we've structured all of that data into the bankless MCP. So you can go and connect it to your cloud or chat DBT and suddenly your AI can answer your crypto queries with the entire bankless archive behind it. And every new bankless article or episode gets added automatically so the context keeps staying up to date. The bankless MCP is exclusively available to bankless premium subscribers. So

you can go to bankless.com, upgrade to premium, and connect the MCP in just a few minutes, and all of a sudden, your crypto queries to your AI, LLM, whatever you use, we'll get a thousand times better. So go check it out. There is a link in the show notes. And once you become a bankless premium member, you can hop into the bankless Discord and let me know how you like it. Cheers. Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the DeFi report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop. happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years.

And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle, there's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes. They're short. They're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most. So let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast. Search the DeFi report. Wherever you get your podcast, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link of the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now. The SEC has a new proposed rule titled Regulation Crypto Assets. This is what we were talking about earlier on the show, which is basically this is the SEC just doing their half of clarity,

whatever they can do to clarity. I'm going to say some things. I'm going to tell you what's going on in here. And you're going to feel like, oh, we've talked about this for all of our time in crypto. This has always been what has been discussed about what we want out of the crypto industry. And We're just getting it from the SEC as rulemaking, not laws, but rulemaking, which is the second best thing as to a law. And so the first one is how startups and crypto can raise money with a token that doesn't make the token a security. And so there is exemptions, three different exemptions that have been produced in this rulemaking that allows for this to happen.

One is a startup exemption, allowing token issue. to raise up to $5 million in a one-time event that allows a team to launch and release a network token. No financial statements are required. No accredited investor limits. No resale restrictions on the token. General solicitation is allowed. The issuer can be an entity,

an individual, or a loose group of people each signing on, but there's a $5 million raise cap on the raise amount. And so this would kind of like token sales, air drops, Like that general kind of like token issuance behavior can be applied here. That's the first exemption. The second exemption is a fundraising exemption. If you're, if you speak trad, this is just reg A for tokens. So issuers can raise a constrained amount of money every 12 months.

You have to do a filing with the SEC. You have to tell them that you're doing this. And there's two different tiers. So tier one with unaudited financials, issuers can raise $20 million every 12 months. And then tier two, if you submit. audited financials that unlocks the ability to raise $75 million every 12 months. So reg A for tokens. And then the third, the third exemption is an investment contract safe harbor.

This is kind of the big one. Rule 400. A crypto asset is deemed no longer subject to be an investment contract and therefore not a security. If the issuer has completed or permanently ceased, all essential managerial efforts it promised and isn't making any new promises. Again, it has a file of form with the SEC saying that it is doing this with a certification and supporting analysis. But nonetheless, you get to say, hey, we are no longer managing this token.

This is a decentralized network. And it's not a security. So this is these new pathways for tokens to be issued, funds to be raised, but those security were just never be invoked. Why are you saying this is all we've ever wanted? Like, this is kind of what, like, I guess what this is doing. doing, I understand it, is it's saying that all of the kind of the ICOs for decentralized networks, the Ethereum ICO, for instance, which was under the crosshairs of the Gensler administration, that is all okay in this new regime, in this new paradigm. And also, that last one you talked about,

the Rule 400, the investment contract safe harbor, that is explicitly painting a path, providing clarity to the crypto industry of how something that is an investment, contract, something that is a security, becomes a commodity, becomes a decentralized network, if it no longer has essential managerial efforts. So it's essentially providing a pathway for networks like Ethereum or say Solana or other crypto networks that launched in that way to become decentralized and no longer securities. That's kind of all we've ever wanted from the SEC, right? Just like stop coming after tokens and give us some clarity. Like this is the SEC's portion of the Clarity Act, is it not, through rulemaking?

Yeah, yeah. And you remember when the XRP versus the SEC versus Gary Gensler case, Ripple won that case? And really what that was about was not about XRP being a security, but it was determined that some, yeah, the investment contracts. These are the investment contracts that creates the token. So A, is even more defended that tokens are not securities.

And now, in addition to that, the investment contracts, these are about the ways that you can create. create an investment contract that is also itself not a security. So these are legal investment contracts to create a token and both of these things are not securities. That's what's very, very exciting. It's very generalizable. It's very scalable. You know what this does away with, Ryan? Air drops, points programs, healed farming, any other stupid, convoluted way to issue and distribute tokens to the general public. Interesting. That is just inefficient, gamable, poor, like, all that mess that we went through time and time and time again

because we needed to find creative ways to get around securities laws. Yeah. Now we have the paths to doing that that's direct and efficient that is confirmed to be not securities. And the requirements are light and there's somewhat of kind of a sandbox, right?

So as you get bigger as it's more funding at stake, like from 20 million to 75 million, you have to do various things, but you don't have to file 10K filings and the whole SEC and all of the overhead. The burdens of compliance. That comes with that. Okay.

I guess a couple of reactions. First of all, that's great. And that means that all of these things that were in this ambiguous area in the past we did, particularly our blockchain to centralize networks, like we don't have to worry

about that being under the crosshairs anymore. And I don't even think, David, a future administration can really reverse this. If the SEC in this administration, 2026, comes out with this rulemaking, right?

Let's say you have AOC, administration or something like this, and it's Gary Gensler v2, and they try to reverse this, the court's got to laugh them out of the court, right? Because just like, guys, guys, hold on. There is some precedent that your institution has to uphold. If you say something is okay in 26, there has to be continuity. You can't reverse everything in 2020. You have to have legal rationale for reversing it, not just a vibe rationale. Exactly. So even if we don't have a bill out there and the clarity, I just think this is really hard, given the precedent that's being set by an institution that has to continuity from one administration to the other to like reverse this.

Maybe some things can be reversed around the edges. So that's one thought. I guess my other thought is like, how much do we really need this anymore? Because like, I mean, for our existing assets, we do. But like, how many more decentralized crypto networks are we actually going to launch? Like we have Bitcoin, we have Ethereum, we have kind of the long tail of blockchain. Are there more that we have to launch? Are we done? It is a little bit ironic that the appetite for issuing a decentralized network to the general public and doing a token distribution program is a thing of the past.

Now that we have the clarity and the regulation that we need to do it, like no investor wants to invest in any of the stuff that this regulation actually protects, at least in this current form of crypto. No one wants new L-1s. No one wants middleware. The appetite is gone. The question is how many more decentralized networks without managerial efforts

do we actually want or need? Yeah, people are really into managerial effort these days. I'm like, I want them for some things. I don't want them for Bitcoin. I don't want them for ether. But I do want them for like a lot of other things in crypto and I wish I had them for those things. Yeah, actually, we need more managerial efforts.

crypto. But anyway, it's great we have a path and this is, I think, the CFTC's portion of the Claire Act. Let me round out this one part that I think is worthwhile. In addition to the startup exemptions that I talked about, in order to have those

startup exemptions be applied to you, you need to take part in standardized disclosures. Again, if you speak trad, this is basically S1 filings for tokens, but it's much easier. There are a couple of rules for how you do this. It must be in plain language and stage appropriate.

So what this means is plain language. You can't obfuscate details with overly technical terminology. And stage appropriate means that forward-looking plans must be clearly delineated from what actually exists. Again, this is like a reminiscent

of the 2017 ICO era where like you would read a white paper and there were some stupid fucking white papers back then with incredibly complicated math that promised the world and retail investors would look at this and be like, wow, geniuses wrote this white paper. I understand nothing. The team is amazing when in fact the team is intentionally

writing ridiculously complicated white papers that don't actually make sense. And the team is actually scammers. And so there's, so you write these disclosures and then there's 10 specific subjects of the disclosure requirements. You have to disclose what you promise and how far you've gotten, what you're selling and what you'll do with the money, who's behind it and what they hold. So management conflicts of interest, related party transactions, like market making stuff, like insider holdings, like all of that, like the Blockworks token transparency report type stuff. Yeah. All of that must be disclosed. Great.

And then how the code works and who controlled it. So in addition to all this, we're getting kind of the disclosures that the industry has also wanted for a very long time. That's great. And if it fills what Hester Persis vision has been for the SEC of don't be a merit-based regulator, okay? Just like, emphasize disclosures, but it's up to investors what they invest in. You're not trying to protect investors from making bad decisions. People can always still make bad decisions. So I think this is a good path for the SEC to take.

Dave, there was a big win for stable coins, actually. He kind of went under the radar with all of this other good news this week. But you picked up on it. What happened? Yeah, so this is the FASB. What is the FASB? Financial Accounting Services Board, Sanders Board, standards board. They are creating a comment period.

This is like the first step. This is probably going to happen. will allow stable coins to be considered cash equivalent on corporate balance sheets. And so right now, stable coins are not considered corporate cash equivalents. The issue that they're fixing is like before this, they're trying to fix this. Right now, some companies will report stable coins as like, yes, this counts as cash. Some will say no. And also the auditors don't agree with the interpretation.

So FASB is just standardizing everything. And so according to this rule, the answer can be, yes, stable coins, are cash or cash equivalent if the following things are true. You can cash out whenever you want, which means you need a direct relationship with Circle, basically, or Paxos. You must cash out with the issuer itself, not a middleman. So you can't use Coinbase. You have to go straight to Circle.

And also the issuer itself backs every coin with real cash or short-term T-bills, which is just genius compliant, which means not tether. So this is, I think, is uniquely bullish for Circle. Oh, for Genius Compliance stable coins. For genius compliance, stable coins. Probably Paxos too, but I think Circle is the big winner here. I think maybe the not the middleman is probably going to be argued out in the comment period just because it constrained things.

But yeah, this is going through common period. This is probably going to happen. You asked if this is a big deal publicly. Austin Campbell says, yeah, it's a big deal. David, you're correct. Like, Faztney is a big deal. Campbell is the stable coin risk guy so he would think it's a big deal. I kind of like, I agree with this.

I mean, FastB's gap standards for accounting, right? That is all corporate balance. That's everything in the U.S. That's the largest capital market standards body setting thing in existence. And they're saying this is now stable coins are cash and cash equivalence. So I do think it's a big deal for adoption and probably went under the radar. Some other things we should cover in crypto. Venice just crossed 100 million.

In annualized revenue, David, that's a pretty big deal. Very big deal, very big deal. Over 4 million users, and Venice also had seven days of consecutive, all-time highs of VVBurn, so there's a lot of energy in the Venice ecosystem right now. At the same time, Stripe acquired Open Router this week, which is very comparable, comparable to Venice itself. It's very different at the same time, but also very similar, and that is both model aggregators.

And then also Ramp bought Router. Open Router is not Router. That's a different company. But it's also very similar. It's just like there's a bunch of models out there. Router, like Open Router, way too similar of name. Aggregate all the models. So the other two model aggregators out there just got bought this week.

Open Router for $7 billion. Open Router has 8 million users got bought for $7 billion. Venice has 4 million users. Currently at a $1.5-something billion dollar FD on the token. They're kind of like, like, right? They're almost like a one-inch, you know, for purchasing AI tokens. They just, like, route it to various models.

One-inch, yeah, this is, I was trying to learn about the details about how to actually compare the thing. I would take the one-inch comparison, actually apply it closer to Venice in the sense that it is user-forward, like users go to one-inch and users go to Venice. OpenRouter is a little bit more like Google AdSense, and that is a marketplace and an auction mechanism for models. Okay. And so it's slightly different.

It's fascinating because OpenRouter doesn't use stable coins right now. So if you want to, you'll purchase something, it just does the old-fashioned way where it'll take like, you know, I don't know, $1,000 or whatever, Agriot, all these transactions and kind of settle it later. So you sort of wonder if Stripe is going to integrate them into the stable coin ecosystem, micro payments, tempo, all of that, a lot of possibility there.

I think the theme really has been energy on the week. Some energy also in FOMO, crossing. 150 AR, we talked about FOMO last week. I learned, David, that you're actually, I don't know if you're a daily active at this point for FOMA, but you enjoy the app. Do you not? I enjoy the app.

I mean, in terms of like just a casual gambling trading app to throw pocket change into, it's a great app. It's a great app. I don't know if the 100 million annualized revenue, I think that's like a high watermark because trading volumes are so volatile.

But there's at least a day where they had 100 million, 150 million annualized revenue, but the growth around FOMO has been just pretty crazy. And so again, we had, you know, the Fed's, the Fed is pumping our bags, excuse me, the Treasury is pumping our bags, the White House is pumping our bags, which is great.

The companies in crypto, startups and crypto are making money, are making bank. And so there's just like fundamental strength in the industry. Yeah, is really, I guess social crypto was meme coins all along, wasn't it? I mean, you kind of think of, Farcaster tried at this for five years, you know, and before throwing the towel. And then they pivoted to becoming a wallet because they realized that people just wanted a wallet to trade mean coins. Sure. And now they're gone.

And it was just Farcaster-flavored mean coins. Yeah. And now FOMO is having the success there. Maybe that was the product market fit all along. They revealed preference. Also, base app integrating hyperliquid. This has got to be the Kobe effect of not prioritizing the base blockchain. This is the work of Kobe. Do you think that's a sign of things to come? The base app is just going to be much more agnostic. with respect to, you know. To Coinbase? Yeah, it's just like user-centric.

It's like, we're going to get you the thing that you want. We don't care what chain it's on. We're not going to prioritize base over anything else. And so we'll just bring Hyperliquid in here. Yeah, yeah. I do kind of wonder how far that will go. Like, will Hyper Liquid try to be the back-in for Coinbase or will Coinbase try and build out their own native products?

You know, if it's Kobe's way, it's like the former. What? You think Kobe's way is just user-centric? like D-Gen trader focused. Now, Kobe's way is he's very bullish on hyperliquered. Oh. He owns a ton of hype. Oh, okay.

So it's hype-specific. Interesting. That is interesting. I wonder if that comes out in the disclosures. Anyway, moving on. Compound? Are they having a little bit of a rebirth? I don't know if I see that yet,

but I see something. They have announced new leadership in, I mean, one of the first D-5 protocols that really took off. It was kind of like second to make your Dow back in the day. And it had a lull where AVE took over. Robert Leshner and leadership kind of like faded. Just almost felt like kind of like not abandoned it, but it just didn't have any leadership.

Well, it was supposed to be very constrained. And so it was like anti-adding new assets to be conservative. Right. But then they also just got straight out-competed by Abe. But they've been printing money for a very long time. I don't know how much TVL is left in compounds. But like they they still, they hold long. to TVL for a very long time just because of how safe it was.

So what's happening now? New leadership, as you said, $52 million approved from the Dow for a development program aimed at institutional credit and real world assets. And so, like, yeah, let's see if we can kind of like kick-st restart this thing. I think that'd be nice. TBD. I think that'd be nice. But there is some energy coming back to OG defy protocols.

In fact, I would almost feel like saying that OGDFI protocols are back. And here's the thing that really crystallized that. for me is did you read this Hayden Adams post? This is his first blog post, founder of Uniswap, since 2019. I have not read it. It's on my to-do list, but I know you read it. So maybe you can explain it to me. It's worth the read, man. I read it this morning, and he's basically saying AMMs could actually eat the world. Okay? And he compares them to index funds. The frame he puts on it is, you know, index funds in 1976, you know, John Bogle, the index fund guy. People, are saying it's un-American, couldn't ever compete against more actively managed funds.

And now passive index funds are the way most Americans hold their capital. Okay, it's passive funds rule. He's equating that to passive L-Ping, basically. Passive AMMs are going to eat the trading market the way passive index funds ate traditional finance. And it gives a lot of reasons why he's, you know, first, We came for the long tail in AMMs. You know, I had the long tail of tokens and better trading experience to do that. The second thing, AMMs went and conquered was sort of paired assets, you know, like USDC and

USDT, those types of pairs. The next thing they're going to start doing is give you options for correlated pairs. So he sees a world where it's actually something like Nvidia and Spy that are the correlated pairs and they become much more liquid than say just Nvidia and USDC or US dollars or something like that. So he provides a whole, I guess, theoretical basis for how AMMs can start really competing against traditional market makers,

against siloed tradfi, and just really like start to dominate the market. It's a compelling article and it just feels like Hayden Uniswap is back and the defy energy is starting to come back, and they're like, no, like, defy is actually better, and here's how. And this is after a decade of doing this. So, I don't know, second wind, energy,

rational points made. I'm excited to see what AMMs and Uniswab and Hayden do in the future. The word that comes to mind is creativity. Yeah. And I think that that's something that this industry has really been missing, and I think something that we all saw in defy. and we don't we haven't had that as much lately and so if hayden you're telling me that we can get really creative with our asset structure uh in the back end then i can get bullish again well can you get bullish again is is that the end of today's this week's episode are you bullish again officially david well i mean since we started uh recording an hour ago ryan east is up eight more percent what's at two thousand three thousand two thousand three hundred and fifty dollars bitcoin is almost at seven 3,000.

And I'm going to go watch the CFTC innovation talk that Mike Seleg is giving right now with Vlad from Leiter's talking at right now. There is a lot to be bullish about. Can I just say that? You could definitely say that. That's a good way to end this episode.

And I guess we'll check in next week to see if this is sustained. All right. I'll see you. Oh, I will not be checking in with me next week because I will be at Burning Man. So bye, I'm gone for two weeks. Hasib's taken over.

So I will see you in three weeks, Ryan. Time to get bullish then. David's gone. Time to get bullish. You better buy your ETH before you leave. Did you know, Ryan? Yeah. That Eith hit all time high while I was at Burning Man one year ago. I think you should give that some serious. That's when the ETH hit all time high was a year ago. That's insane. I thought it was so much longer. You need to get your buys on before you leave. That's what that means to me. All right. I'll see you in three weeks. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky, but not risky enough. The institutions are here. So we are leaving. going even further west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you were with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.